Among the possible attacks performed by hackers to extract confidential data from a memory, for example; a protected memory of a chip card, there are the attacks said to be by fault injection (DFA or “Differential Fault Analysis”) which are designed to disrupt the operation and/or the content of the memory, for example; via a radiation (laser, infrared, X-rays, etc.). It is therefore particularly useful to be able to detect such an attack by fault injection. Once the attack is detected, there are numerous approaches depending on the application for either blocking the component, or preventing the sensitive data from being read, or resetting the component.
For the conventional memory architectures, for example, those of the bit-by-bit type in which each bit stored can be read individually, there is a possibility of detecting such an attack based on a check on the parity of the bits read during a read operation.
However, such approaches may not make it possible, in certain cases, to detect an attack by fault injection when such an attack has actually taken place.